WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A "death star" galaxy is sending out
a powerful jet of particles and magnetic radiation that is
likely obliterating any possible life in its broad path,
notably in a nearby galaxy, astronomers said on Monday.

They said the two galaxies appear to be merging and the
disturbance in the magnetic field caused by this movement may
have awakened a dormant, supermassive black hole in one of the
galaxies.

They have images of the deadly blast, spurting out from a
system known as 3C321.

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Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show both
galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers, and
3C321, the larger galaxy, is emitting this stream of energy and
particles. The unnamed smaller galaxy apparently has swung into
the path of this jet.

The astronomers agree that both galaxies are likely to have
planetary systems but nothing resembling life on any planet
could survive the blast. While such jets have been seen before,
this is the first time one has been observed battering another
galaxy, the researchers report in The Astrophysical Journal.

"First its enormous gamma ray radiation field is likely to
destroy the ozone layer," Dan Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, who led the study, told reporters in a
telephone briefing.

And the magnetic field of any planet would be compressed,
leaving it vulnerable to solar storms from its star.

"There are tens to hundreds of millions of stars in the
path. Some of those stars almost certainly have planets," said
Martin Hardcastle an astrophysicist at Britain's University of
Hertfordshire.

"It's ... like a bully, a black hole bully, punching the
nose of any passing galaxy," Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of
the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, told the briefing.

There is no need to worry about this death ray hitting
Earth -- the galaxies are 1.4 billion light years away -- a
light year being the distance light travels in a year, or about
6 trillion miles.

Several telescopes were used to build a picture of the
violent event, including the Chandra observatory, Hubble Space
Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as Earthbound
observatories such as the Very Large Array telescope in New
Mexico and Britain's Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer
Network or MERLIN telescopes.

Such jets from black holes have been seen before, and they
produce high amounts of radiation, especially high-energy
X-rays and gamma-rays.

"In addition to that, there is high energy radiation coming
out from the center of the active galaxy. That is not the jet,"
Evans said.

It is not clear why the larger galaxy started shooting out
these deadly rays. "We know how you can trigger a black hole by
having two galaxies interact because it disrupts the gravity
field that was previously stable," Tyson said.

Evans said the two galaxies appear to be in the process of
a billion-year-long-merger. "They are actually doing somewhat
of a dance around each other," he said.

It may not mean all death and destruction -- such events
can eventually lead to the creation of "stellar nurseries" and
the birth of new stars, Tyson said.